William Penn still had many friends at court, and it was doubtless largely through their efforts that he succeeded in having the bill to take Pennsylvania away from him withdrawn from Parliament. There were a number of prominent men in the government, however, who thought that none of the American colonies should be owned by private persons, but that all should be directly under the Crown, and these men soon offered another bill much like the earlier one. To defeat this, Penn and Lord Baltimore joined hands and ceased to wrangle over the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. A few days after this bill was presented in Parliament, however, King William died from injuries resulting from the fall of a horse he was riding. The king had been influential in urging the change in the government of Penn's province, but his successor, Queen Anne, was much more friendly to Penn. The matter was therefore allowed to drop.

Although the daughter of James Stuart, Queen Anne was a Protestant, and had married a Protestant, Prince George of Denmark. She was liberal to all religions, and soon after she became queen the Quakers asked Penn to present her with an address thanking her for the toleration toward all sects that she had promised to observe. Penn read the address. Queen Anne then answered graciously enough, "Mr. Penn, I am so well pleased that what I have said is to your satisfaction, that you and your friends may be assured of my protection, and I sincerely hope for your welfare and happiness."

She kept her word to the Quakers, and also proved the constant friend of Penn. She had seen him much at court when her father was king, and knew of the old friendship between her father and the Quaker leader. Therefore Penn became in a way a courtier again, and held somewhat the same prominent position he had held before William came to the throne.

He spent much of his time in London, where he now had friends in both the Whig and Tory parties. The leading statesmen thought so highly of his abilities that they frequently asked him to arrange political and personal matters that required tact and diplomatic skill. Sometimes he tried to exercise these qualities by correspondence with the lawmakers of Pennsylvania, and one of his latest efforts was on behalf of the negro slaves in the province. Ten years before he had tried to get justice done to these people, but in vain. Now he felt more strongly than ever that it was wrong to import negroes into the new country as slaves. He worked for this object until he induced the colonial Assembly to try to discourage that traffic by placing a duty on the importing of slaves. In 1711 they prohibited such importation in the future, but no sooner had word of this good law reached England than the government there, in spite of Penn's efforts, canceled the Pennsylvania act. Yet the wisest statesmen in England realized that Penn was right, and that the course he was urging his colony to adopt, not only in regard to negro slavery but in all matters that dealt with human liberty and enlightenment, was the best for the new world to follow.

Of Penn's children by his first wife, the lively Letitia married William Aubrey, who was harsh and overbearing to her father and tyrannical toward her. His son William had married, but had become very dissipated during his father's visit to Pennsylvania, and was now the black sheep of the family. He owed a great many debts and was in danger of being put into prison for them, so Penn decided he would be better off in Pennsylvania, and sent him out to Pennsbury. He was to be encouraged to live a healthy outdoor life, and have horses and hounds for hunting foxes, deer, and wolves. The son went out to Pennsbury, and James Logan tried to keep a watchful and restraining eye on him, but he managed to get into almost as much trouble there as he had in London, in spite of all efforts to keep him straight.

A great change had come over England since the days when the Stuarts were sovereigns. The old brutal laws had been abolished for the most part, and there was far less cruelty and violence. Instead of the dissolute Charles and the treacherous James, the rulers were honorable and virtuous. There were no longer constant rumors of plots and conspiracies, and all religions were treated fairly. William Penn found that he was no longer needed to help some poor Quaker who had fallen under the disfavor of officers of the law. Now his difficulties were mainly those connected with trying to provide a decent government for his province, and to get enough money from it to pay expenses.

Before Penn left Pennsylvania the Assembly there had voted to pay him £2000, but that was soon spent, and the settlers were so economical that they did not wish to give him anything more. Again and again he wrote to James Logan about his financial difficulties in managing Pennsylvania. In one letter he said: "Never had poor man my task, with neither men nor money to assist me. I therefore strictly charge thee that thou represent to Friends there, that I am forced to borrow money, and add debts to debts, instead of paying them off.... Make return with all speed or I'm undone."

He tried many ways to make his province pay him something in return for the work and money he had already bestowed on it. He urged Logan to buy and send him as many furs as he could get, knowing that they would bring a good price in England. At one time he thought of selling his government directly to the English Crown for a sum sufficient to pay off all his debts. There was considerable haggling about the price and the sale was never made. Meantime his son William was getting into more trouble at Pennsbury and in Philadelphia. One night he and a dissipated comrade began to beat the night watch. He received a thrashing, and was afterwards treated as a common rioter. The son had been given a manor in the hope that he would look after it, but instead he sold it and squandered all the money. At last Penn sent for him to come home, and when William the younger finally reached England, he took to his former way of living, and incurred fresh debts for his already impoverished and indulgent parent.

Penn figured that he had lost £30,000 by his province. "O Pennsylvania," he wrote, "what hast thou cost me! Above £30,000 more than I ever got by it, two hazardous and most fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's soul almost.... In short, I must sell all or be undone, and disgraced into the bargain."

The man who was now acting as deputy governor of Pennsylvania was proving a poor makeshift, and conditions in the province seemed to be going from bad to worse. Opposition to Penn himself also was increasing, and presently the Assembly passed a set of resolutions that were sent to him in London. These resolutions made many complaints against his government of the province, charging him with having sided with enemies of the colony, with having extorted money from settlers in the sale of lands, with having failed to pay a former governor's salary, and ended by stating that something must be done to suppress lawlessness in the province. When it became known that the Assembly had sent such a note to Penn, the colonists at once objected to the offensiveness of its tone. Orders were given to recall the resolutions, and, in an attempt to straighten the matter out, the Assembly voted £1200 for the support of Penn's government. All might now have gone smoothly had not the deputy governor, John Evans, tried to scare the Quakers by a foolish trick. He had been wanting to build up a militia for the province, but the Quakers had objected to this. So, on the day of the annual fair, Evans arranged to have a messenger ride into Philadelphia, bringing the exciting news that a force of French soldiers had been seen on the Delaware heading toward Philadelphia. Then Evans buckled on his sword and rode up and down before the people, urging them to arm and defend their province.

There was a brief alarm, during which the larger ships on the Delaware were hurried up the river while the smaller craft were concealed in creeks. Silverware and valuables were hidden, but only four men came to the meeting-place Evans had appointed to enroll as militiamen. When it was discovered how Evans had tried to trick them, the settlers were highly indignant, and sent a complaint to Penn in England. Penn also heard that there was much criticism of his friend and secretary, James Logan.

A few of the men in whom Penn trusted, like James Logan, were entirely worthy of his trust, but there were many who were not. Among these latter was a man named Philip Ford, a Quaker, who had for some time been acting as steward of Penn's estates in England and Ireland. Penn grew very fond of Ford, as he had been very fond of James Stuart, and at length made him a present of ten thousand acres in Pennsylvania, a city lot in Philadelphia, and one hundred and fifty acres in the suburbs.

Ford sent accounts to Penn from time to time, but Penn was not a good business man, and did not bother to look into the accounts. Finally, when he did, he found the surprising fact that although Ford had received from Penn £17,000 and had only spent £16,000, nevertheless Penn owed him £10,500. Ford brought about this result by charging very large commissions, adding compound interest every six months to all money advanced, and claiming an exceedingly large salary, to say nothing of sometimes failing to credit Penn with money actually received from him.

Yet Penn, although surprised at this new debt, made no investigation into the crooked accounts, and at length, when Ford kept urging him to pay the debt, Penn was so foolish as to give Ford a deed of the province of Pennsylvania as security for this claim that he did not really owe. To make matters worse, a little later Penn accepted from Ford a lease of the province, so that it appeared that he had actually transferred the province to this corrupt steward and was now leasing it from him.

None of this strange transaction was made public until Ford died, but then his widow and son declared how the matter stood and announced that they were the legal owners of Pennsylvania. Penn, they said, was merely their tenant, and they sued him for rent amounting to £3000. They got judgment against him, and then, when he failed to pay it, had him arrested and put in prison for the debt. So now we find the owner of the great province of Pennsylvania not only shorn of his title to his property, but actually in jail on a charge of failing to pay his rent.

When the officers came to arrest him, they found him at the Quaker meeting in Gracechurch Street in London, strange to say the very place where he had first been arrested thirty-seven years before for preaching to the Quakers.

For nine months Penn had to stay in prison, while the suit against him dragged slowly through the courts of chancery. The fact that he had paid so little attention to Ford's accounts, and had made no complaint about the figures in them, made it look as if the claim against him might be just. His friends tried to straighten out the tangled matter, and meantime Penn, who was allowed fairly comfortable quarters, held small religious meetings, and kept himself as serene and untroubled as in the heyday of his fortunes. In this again the strong character of William Penn appears, for he was not cast down by misfortune. His friend Isaac Norris bore witness to this quality. "After all," said Norris, "I think the fable of the palm good in him—'the more he is pressed, the more he rises.' He seems a spirit fit to bear and rub through difficulties, and as thou observes his foundation remains. I have been at some meetings with him, and have been much comforted in them, and particularly last First-day."

Gradually public sympathy, especially among the Quakers, began to be aroused by the fact of Penn's imprisonment. He had done so much for the Quaker cause, and had tried so hard to give his province a good government, that people were indignant that he should now be so set upon by such people as the Fords. So friends raised the sum of £7600, and gave this to the Fords in settlement of their claim, and in return Penn gave his friends a mortgage on Pennsylvania to secure the repayment of the money they had lent him.

Meantime, while he was still in prison, his deputy governor Evans had been behaving so badly that the people of the province decided they would stand him no longer. Penn, having once felt a strong friendship for this man, would have put up with almost any injustice from him. Three prominent Quakers went to him in the Fleet Prison, however, and told him that unless he removed Evans from the governorship the people would appeal to Queen Anne to settle the matter. This might result in taking the province from him; so, reluctantly, Penn agreed to dismiss Evans from his position. Even then, however, he was so fond of Evans that he would not let him know that he disapproved of his acts. He wrote to James Logan, asking him to explain the matter to his deputy governor, and said, "Pray break it to him and that the reason why I chose to change, rather than contest with the complaints before the queen in council, is, that he may stand the fairer for any employment elsewhere; which would be very doubtful if those blemishes were aggravated in such a presence."

In place of Evans, Penn sent out as the new governor another friend of his, Colonel Charles Gookin. He wrote very flattering accounts of this new governor to the people of Philadelphia.

Stanchness in standing by his friends, even when it was shown that those friends were utterly untrustworthy, had proved nearly as disastrous to William Penn in the government of his province as it had proved to his fortunes in England in the days when he had supported James Stuart against King William. It may have been a fine fault, but a fault it was, nevertheless.